The South is a big region in a big country.That's the main thing. We're "so deep into that landscape we did not realize/ we'd been talking in accents all our lives"
--Pierce Pettis, "Little River Canyon"

Monday, September 29, 2008

White for Harvest

The Alabama poet Jeanie Thompson titled a book of her poems WHITE FOR HARVEST. That came to mind yesterday as I walked out the front doors of a small church on Gunwaleford Road. I had just attended a worship service. Frank Johnson--the man you have read about before in this blog, the man who grows a large field of peas every year and invites all his friends and neighbors to help themselves--Frank was there. Along with his nephew and a couple of sisters-in-law.

It had been that kind of September weekend you wait and hope for. After a cool night of sleeping hard with the windows open, I awoke to a slight chill that was shooed away with a cup of hot coffee. I smiled to think of yesterday's football games as lavender wisps of fog burned off the surface of the lake with the first warm rays of morning sun. The leaves on the trees were still green, but a few low branches on the waterfront sweet gums blushed with color. As the sun climbed, the sky became a deeper shade of blue. Not quite October blue on blue. But getting there. The last of the migrating hummingbirds buzzed the feeders that I would take up at the end of the day, wash, and put away until next year.

On and off for the last twenty years that my family has been coming out Gunwaleford Road, the people at the small church a half mile away have asked us to visit. Today I ate a leisurely breakfast on the screened porch, showered, and peered into the closet to pull out what might pass as church clothes. We timed our arrival so we could get there late and sit in the back. Our plans failed when the preacher, Brother Melvin, spotted us and shook our hands, pulling us right up front to sit on the second pew. A man who arrived at at the same time we did, a barrel-chested man wearing a football jersey,sat right behind us.

It would not be right for me to tell you everything that happened. That's something you need to go see and decide for yourself. There was no piano, no stained glass windows. No electric guitars or choir robes. The barrel-chested man turned out to have a baritone voice that needed no microphone, no amplifier. After the song leader led several standard songs from the hymnal, the barrel-chested man walked to the front and sang from his heart, the rest of us answering his call, line for line. You didn't have to have a hymnal to sing that song: if you had lived that song, you would know how to sing it, the barrel-chested man just supplied us with some words. Then Brother Melvin took his place at the podium and defined synecdoche better than my literature professors ever had. He gave it a French pronunciation; they had used the Latin.

On the way out the door after the service, tall Frank Johnson waited to shake my hand. I told him the truth, that I was going to eat his peas for lunch. He laughed out loud. I noticed he was wearing a big yellow Obama pin. I asked him why the only Obama sign I had seen was the one in front of his sister-in-law's house. "They steal the signs at night and throw them away" was all he said, with a smile.

And then I am walking out those two front church doors, out of the protected shade of the church building out into the bright hot sun. After my eyes adjust I see, just across Gunwaleford Road, mile upon mile of rolling rows of white cotton, all ready for the machines to come and pick it and take it down the road to the gin. All that cotton, its bolls burst open, was at its peak, just sitting there, waiting. By November the rains will have come and all that's left will be mud and stalks, the lay of the land exposed to winter. But today the fields were white for harvest, perfect and hopeful, under a warm blue sky.

5 comments:

This is a lovely story in its own right, but I am most impressed that you and Ed actually attended a different church! That's got to be refreshing. I had to look up the word 'synecdoche', so I learned something new.

me

Website: www.amgarner.com

Video of Co. Rd 14 Tour

View the new video with me narrating a tour of County Rd. 14 at www.amgarner.com and click on HEAR ANITA.

Frank's Peas

Talking in Accents: Diversity in Southern Fiction

It is easy to make up characters who live in double-wide mobile homes, wear beehive hairdos and feed caps, never put a 'g' on the end of a participle...; who aspire only to own a bass boat, eat something fried, speak in tongues. What is difficult is to take the poor, the uneducated, the superstitious, the backward, the redneck...and make them real human beings, with hopes and dreams and aspirations. Tony Earley

Other places to visit (and don't forget to take the County Road 14 Photo Tour, right after POSTS)

UNDENIABLE TRUTHS

The Southland with Blue Sky

County Road 2 Tour

When you turn onto County Rd. 2 in early September, look for the Dove Hunt signs, which mean that on the following Saturday, a dove hunt will be organized in one of the fields.

Dove Hunt Here

Drive through five or so miles of rolling fields and suddenly you find you have arrived at the scene of the Dove Hunt. A truck is parked near the main road (Co. Rd. 2) and a man sits at a table, signing in participants and spelling out the rules. The hunt takes place in the large fields where corn has been harvested. (You can see the stubble around the Dove Hunt Here sign.) The doves love to scavenge the fields for spilled grain.

Cotton on Gunwaleford Road

The view from the front doors of the church.

Sunrise: Picking Peas off County Rd. 2

Drive five or six more miles through County Rd. 2's fields and you'll come to a crossroads.I got this shot just as the sun was peaking over the horizon in one of the big fields off Gunwaleford Rd. ( County Rd. 2 is also called Gunwaleford Road.) Frank Johnson's ancestors lived on this land while it was still a reservation. He plants a large field every year in corn and another in the best purple-hulled peas you've ever eaten. When the corn and, later, peas are ready to harvest, he starts calling all the neighbors. The best thing to do is to get up before dawn to pick peas. The fields are cool and the only sound is the breeze. It took my husband and me two hours to pick plenty of peas to eat now and freeze for later. The morning glories climb the stalks of the pea plants.

Morning glory

The peas in the fields are covered in morning glories that are open for sun rise.

Pea Sheller

Spending two hours picking peas is one thing. Spending eight hours shelling them is another. My suggestion: take them to the pea shelling machine. Other cool stuff at this store: sticky paper spider traps, local honey, good waterproof duck hunting boots. The proprietor is a friendly guy who will give you helpful hints about pea picking and how to store the peas spread out to dry overnight for the best results from the pea shelling machine.

Coldwater Seed and Supply

Home of the pea sheller. OK, technically you have to drive back into town for this, but if you've picked several bushels of peas, believe me, it's worth it.

The Lake Winks Silver

Further out Gunwaleford Road is Sunset Beach on the Tennessee River, within sight of the Natchez Trace bridge. This part of the Tennessee is Pickwick Lake, smallmouth bass heaven. The large hybrid striped bass also have seasonal runs. Catfish up to 100 lbs. have been caught in the locks at Pickwick Dam. Windsurfing days are best in spring and early fall when the seasonal changes bring wind warnings for area lakes.

Coon Dog Cemetery

Continuing the tour, bring a camera, a cooler, and some tick spray. It's a short ride to the Coon Dog Cemetery.

Head stone at the Coon Dog Cemetery

If you take Co. Rd. 2 all the way to the Natchez Trace Bridge and then follow the Trace across the Tennessee River, you will enter Colbert County where the Coon Dog Cemetery is found.

Head stone at the Coon Dog Cemetery

I can't imagine naming a dog High Pocket. When I'm naming a dog, I always try to envision what I would feel like calling the name loudly if the dog became lost. "Here, High Pocket." No, I don't think so. Too impersonal. But I love High Pocket's stone, love the way the dog is waiting on his/her master, or maybe just stretched out in the shade of the porch in an Alabama August. Someone really loved High Pocket.

November 1

They just couldn't leave

Some of the white pelicans stayed through the summer.

January

Thanksgiving Morning, 2014.

START YOUR TOUR with Coosa County Road 14

This just about sums it up. Literally and figuratively.

A Rocky Ford

Before there was a road, wagons forded the creek on these rocks. To the left just out of the frame is a large white sand bar. The bluff in the background climbs up a hundred feet or so and is covered in mountain laurel laced with wisps of Spanish moss. Where North Alabama meets South Alabama.

Geocaching. Sort of.

Locking in coordinates.

MORE COOSA. Geocaching, sort of.

Dovetailed logs on corner of cabin.

Interior logs

The cabin has log walls inside.

one of the deer paths

Ammonium nitrate makes the grass green and sweet

No one agrees when I say we should use the hose to spray off the mud

...standing beside muddy Jeep tires

Moss grows on the flat rocks

Waverly in Alabama

Waverly can play a reel fast and pure enough to make your heart spin.

Sears Chapel Church

Built right before the Civil War by my relatives who made furniture down the hill on Hatchett Creek, Sears Chapel held services only on the first Sunday of the Month. There was an outhouse, no air conditioning, plenty of wasps circling the light fixtures that hung from chains from the high ceilings. More often than not, we were late for services so we just drove on by and looked for somewhere to have Sunday lunch. Kowaliga was a favorite. Or barbecue at Cotton's. Growing up I kept my clothes in a pine wardrobe built by the same people who built the church. My daughter's dresses hang there today.

Coosa County Musicians

Think of this photo as you read "The Mayor of Nowhere" in UNDENIABLE TRUTHS.

Churchyard

This is where we're all buried. Except the ones who died before the church was built. They're buried out in the woods, and every twenty years or so, we visit the graves. To make sure they haven't just up and left.